John Lescroart - The Hearing

'It's not right?'

'No.'

Hardy nodded as though he expected this answer. He moved back to the defense table and took another folder forward. 'All right, then, how about these pages, Mr Logan? Do these look any better?'

Rattled enough to begin with, Logan was so happy to see the pages he'd doctored that he didn't think to ask where Hardy had gotten them – which was through Glitsky after the police search of Logan's office last night. The ledgers had been the first thing they had copied. Logan studied the pages for a while, then said that yes, this looked more like his ledger.

'Looks more like it? Is it or isn't it?'

'Yes, it is.'

Hardy had it entered as Defense H, then came back to him. 'Mr Logan, looking again at these business ledgers, Defense Exhibit G and H, you'll notice that there are six entries in the latter that were originally made out to various business payees and then voided. Can you explain these entries?'

'My secretary screwed up. I don't know.'

'In Defense G, these same entries are blank, as you noticed. How do you explain that?'

A shrug. 'I don't know that either. Somebody could have whited out the entry, then copied it. So it would look blank.'

'Or the record of the original checks was purposely kept out of the ledger. Isn't that really why they were left blank, Mr Logan? Isn't it true that the voided entries are fallacious, intended to camouflage the real payee on these checks after the fact?'

'No. What are you talking about? Give me a break, would you?'

Pratt had been forbearing with her objections for quite a while and finally she decided she had to get back on the boards. 'Your honor? If this line of questioning is even tangentially related to the death of Elaine Wager, I fail to see it. Do you?'

Judge Hill scowled. 'I'm taking that as another relevance objection, counsel. Mr Hardy, I'm inclined to sustain this one unless you can bring me some closure. Where is this going?'

'This is going to the original payee on these six checks, your honor. We have gone to great lengths in this hearing to draw the inescapable conclusion that Mr Logan and Mr Visser have colluded in illegal activities together, possibly even the delivery of uncut heroin to Cullen Alsop, which caused his death. Ms Wager's discovery of these illegal activities-'

'Your honor,' Pratt interrupted, 'not only is the conclusion far from inescapable, it's demonstrably false. Elaine Wager couldn't have discovered anything about Cullen Alsop's death. He died a week after she did.'

'And she was killed,' Hardy raised his voice, 'because she discovered something Mr Logan was trying to keep covered up.' The gallery came to life behind Hardy, but he spoke loudly through it. 'Something she found in his office while she was working there in her court-appointed role as a special master-'

'Your honor!' Torrey was on his feet, interrupting even more loudly. 'This is inexcusable. We've seen no evidence for any of these outrageous accusations. Now Mr Hardy is simply arguing, creating some grand conspiracy out of whole cloth when he hasn't been able to produce one document or any other shred of evidence. These are monstrous charges against Mr Logan and who knows who else. We have to see some evidence, some actual proof of all this illegal activity, this conspiracy to cover up and commit murder. If he doesn't have it, it's time to call this to a halt.'

The gallery's volume swelled and Hill gaveled it quiet, then glowered down over the edge of the bench. 'Mr Hardy, Mr Torrey's right. If you've got some proof of any of these accusations, the court needs to see it now.'

Hardy stood alone in the center of the courtroom, in the now dead stillness. 'Of course, your honor,' he said, turning back to David and Cole at his table. He grabbed the folder David held out for him and walked back before the bench. His footfalls echoed.

As expected, Glitsky had gone into the Solarium first thing in the morning. He had, in fact, noticed the picture of Loretta Wager that Hardy had left out on the table. And seeing it had jogged his memory – it was the one item in the box that he hadn't had the heart to really look at. Which is what he did then, taking the cardboard backing out of the frame, discovering the NCR copies of checks that Elaine had hidden there after she'd removed them from Logan's office.

Hardy was now presenting them to the court. 'Your honor, I submit for the court's inspection, xerox copies of Mr Logan's supposedly voided checks, numbers 314, 322, 337, 343, 351, and 374, all referenced to various subcontractors with Gironde Industries, with which I'm sure the court is familiar. And all of these checks are made out to the same payee.' He turned and faced the prosecution's table. 'Gabriel Torrey.'

After the uproar in the courtroom passed, Pratt, especially, wanted to retire to discuss this startling evidence in the judge's chambers. If she thought this was going to somehow play to her advantage, Judge Hill, his ire now truly aroused, disabused her of that notion.

Hardy was glad to see that he didn't have to draw a map for the judge. Just inside the door to his chambers, the Cadaver didn't even bother shucking himself out of his robes, but spun on the assemblage with a hail of invective as the court reporter struggled to set up and record what he was saying. The Chief Assistant District Attorney's involvement in any scheme like this was unconscionable and probably criminal. The judge opined that it might be a good idea for Torrey to get himself a good attorney of his own. 'Your honor, there is a simple explanation. I-' Hill cut him off. 'I'm not interested. Whether or not you have done anything unethical or even criminal is beside the point, and I'm predicting you're going to get all the chance you need to explain everything you've done.' He whirled now on the District Attorney herself. 'And in any case, Ms Pratt, the appearance of impropriety is so strong, I'm surprised that you let your deputy proceed at all in this matter. No, I'm more than surprised. I'm appalled. Can it be you had no knowledge of your Chief Assistant's involvement in any of this?'

Pratt's face had gone from crimson to pale, from rage to a tight-lipped, controlled panic. She seemed unable to respond at all, but it didn't matter as the judge turned again. 'Now, Mr Hardy.'

Reluctant to throw any water on the judge's blaze, the defense team had been doing a fair imitation of a couple of statues over by the window, and now at the summons, Hardy came forward a step or two and assumed an at-ease position. 'Yes, your honor.'

'It appears that you've produced your smoking gun linking Mr Torrey here to his friends outside in the gallery. I'm willing to buy that there was something to hide at Mr Logan's office, and that Ms Wager found it. For the sake of argument I'll even concede the possibility of criminal collusion – destroying the checks, the copies, cooking the ledger entries. But here I must caution you – we are engaged in a hearing on a charge of murder-'

'Your honor, excuse me.' Hardy found it difficult to believe that Torrey had the brass to speak up and interrupt at this juncture, but the man's arrogance apparently knew no bounds. He didn't wait for the judge's acknowledgment, either, but went straight to his point. 'The court ought to know that I talked to Elaine about this problem several weeks ago, just after her first time at Logan's when, in fact, she did run across the check receipts by mistake. She knew she had no legal reason to have seen them. She came to me because we used to be friends.'

'More than friends,' Freeman corrected mildly.

Torrey shrugged that away, although Pratt once again seemed to take it almost as a blow. 'The point is I've got the notes of that meeting in my minute file. You're welcome to send somebody up and check right now. So there wasn't anything to cover up. And just for the record, your honor, I'm aware of what it looks like, but Dash isn't the world's best bookkeeper and his secretary… In any event, the money was payment for personal gambling debts-'